


Displaced Radio Waves

by inimitablesatirist (orphan_account)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Accidental Self-Harm, Cecil is in pain, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mirrors, Night Vale, Post-Strex Kevin, Post-Triptych Angst, Pre-Strex Kevin, Repitition, Scrublands and the Sandwastes, Strex Kevin, This is pretty angsty, more accurately hurt/comfort/ambiguous ending, not couple-centric but it's pretty important
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-19 01:49:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8184484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/inimitablesatirist
Summary: It's after the triptych, after everything that happened. Cecil is afraid to look into a mirror. He's terrified of the three faces he might see looking back.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So basically, after listening to Triptych for the tenth time, I decided I should probably make a fanfic about it. 
> 
> It's surprisingly difficult to write for Cecil, because he needs to be so eloquent and poetic and weird. I hope I did it alright. Enjoy!

After it all- after everything that happens- Cecil leaves the radio station. It’s dark, now. Truly night. Sometimes it isn’t really night when he signs off, but that’s how it’s always ended: _Goodnight._ Repetition is soothing. Repetition is soothing. He doesn’t get in his car when he walks outside, leaving the air-conditioned cool rooms for the different sort of cool desert night. He veers off at the last moment, staring blankly at the shiny metal door of the car, then blinking rapidly and turning away. His car is yellow. If it were purple, it would fit the theme of NVCR, but he hadn’t bought the car, someone else did, long years ago when he was a teenager and the world made sense, even if he didn’t. Cecil doesn’t remember who it was now. For a moment, he pauses, staring blankly at the little structure where he works, a radio station, painted a haphazard purple. Looking but not seeing, he tries to remember who got him that shiny yellow car, with paint chipped off in some places and on too thick in others. Can’t. He blinks again and he’s walking away, legs moving robotically, arms tight to his sides, not swinging. The ground beneath his feet turns from crumbling pavement to fine sand. He knows where he’s going. He’s not sure at all. This makes perfect sense to him, just as everything does in Night Vale. Life is a conflict of opposite truths, Cecil says to himself, and then marks it down as poetic enough to use on his show at some point. Everything is poetic, if you look close enough, but people don’t really look very closely at things these days. 

Cecil wishes he could feel something, think something. If only just to remind himself that he’s real.

He shoves his hands into his pockets, wiggles his fingers around in the small space. He’s at the top of the hill, now, a hill coated in a layer of gray-gold sand and dark rocks and dusty brush, all pale in the moonlight. Cecil sits down, folded in on himself. He’s still wearing the ridiculous clothing Station Management has forced him to wear for “professionalism”- button down shirt, simple, dark jeans, tie, shoes. Not at all his style, but it’s apparently “professional”. He tugs at the sleeves of the shirt weakly. 

Tears are on his face, he realizes suddenly. It’s been so long since he cried like this, heavy and not noticing, liquid slipping down his cheeks and overflowing at the corners of his eyes. Silent. 

_It could have been me._

The thought is sudden, and quiet, and it rips through his head the way screams rip through your ears. _It could have been me, just as easily as it could have been him, and it’s all my fault. All my fault._ Cecil wishes he couldn’t feel things, or think things. Such perfect, painless symmetry.

He notices that his fingers are digging into his skin only when his palms start bleeding, and he doesn’t recoil, just watches the dark red substance trail languidly down his hands, dripping slowly into the sand. _Maybe he would’ve liked that. He would’ve smiled, maybe._ Cecil laughs to himself, and even in his head, it’s a bitter, mirthless noise. _He was always smiling, though.Then. Now. Whenever._ It was a perfect triptych, the events of today. Past, present, future. Somewhere, in another desert so like this one, Kevin was smiling, and there was blood on his face. 

There’s a crunching of sand behind him, and he whips around, breathing catching in his throat, and for a moment he knows it must be Kevin, but it isn’t, thank all the lights in the sky. Or maybe he’s not thankful. Maybe he wishes it were Kevin. 

“Cecil,” says a voice, soft and quiet and forgiving. Always forgiving. “Cecil, honey...” 

Cecil presses the heels of his hands to the bones underneath his eyes, blood mixing with tears. “Carlos.” is what he says, with a period at the end, but it comes out like a question. 

“It’s me,” Carlos confirms, and Cecil can almost hear the comforting smile in his voice. “I heard your show today.” Cecil shrinks into himself as Carlos crouches down beside him, not touching him, just offering himself as quiet support. He’s more guilty, now, and he didn’t think it was possible at this point. He doesn’t deserve Carlos. People like him don’t deserve beautiful people, like Carlos, people that love so strongly. 

“I know,” he says softly. His voice is choked, and he hates the sound of his words stumbling out like drunken men from a bar, staggering over each other awkwardly. He knows that Carlos heard his show; he knows that Carlos listens every time he goes on air, welcoming him and you and everyone to Night Vale. Carlos always listens. 

A hand, slim-fingered and graceful, touches his back lightly, hesitantly. Sometimes Cecil doesn’t want to be touched when he’s like this, and sometimes he does, and sometimes it’s both. A constant conflict. 

Carlos murmurs, “Would you like to talk about it?” The radio host thinks for a moment. He is kneeling in the sand, and he isn’t sure when he got there, except it must have been before Carlos got arrived. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and nods. Talking helps, for him. It always helps. 

“Yes. I would- I would like to talk.” 

His boyfriend’s arm curls around him slowly, like a question, one that Cecil decides he can leave unanswered. “What are you feeling?” Carlos says. It sounds scientific, if he only examines the words, but the emotion behind those clinical, precise words is soft and kind and understanding, or if nothing else trying to understand. 

Cecil takes a deep breath. “I am feeling--- sad,” he says, and half-winces at the childlike description. “I feel like a part of me is missing,” he adds, and that’s more accurate. He can feel Carlos nod behind him. “I am angry, too.” Carlos makes an affirmative noise from behind him, and Cecil pauses. 

“Do you know why you’re angry?” 

He does, he does, and it tears at him from within, but he shakes his head from without answering, squeezing his eyes shut, continuing. “Most of all, though, I am guilty.” Carlos says nothing, and so Cecil lapses into his radio voice, letting his tone grow deeper and more detached, as if nothing means anything at all to him. In some ways, he _is_ like a scientist, in that emotions cannot interfere with his job when it matters most. 

“Cecil,” Carlos says softly, if only just to fill the silence, and his arm is warm around the radio host’s cold shoulders, and his head is pressed into Cecil’s neck. His presence is comforting and asks nothing of him, and it makes Cecil want to cry all over again. Instead, though, he shrinks further into himself. 

“Today, listeners,” he says, and he and Carlos both flinch slightly; it’s verbal tic that happens whenever he tries to slip into that radio persona to protect himself, and he wishes so much that he could stop it. “Today,” he amends, “I heard the voice of Kevin, and in my mind saw his many faces. I had thought, or rather hoped- wrongly, it seems- that I would never hear from him again after Ca- _you_ came back from that desert otherworld.” Thankfully, Carlos doesn’t react to the slip-up. “His voice was strange, early on in the broadcast. It was level, and genuinely excited, about life, about the future, about _everything._ He wanted those monsters gone so badly…” His voice breaks, and Carlos whispers something unintelligible against his neck. The movement and the warmth steadies him (perhaps in a better time, they would even have made him smile), and he takes a deep breath. “Then, later on, there was a crackle of static and his voice cut out. I didn’t know what had happened to him, until his voice came back, and it was…. _different,_ somehow. More variance in the tone, strength and emotion sweeping in and out, in and out. Like waves, almost, but more violent, more menacing. There was more threat there, and I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly had happened to him- what _they_ had done.” Cecil wants so much to drop the voice, just for a moment, but he can’t. “I had told him about the uprising. I realize now that I may have triggered some of the events that made my own life so difficult.” He tries to speak again, and it doesn’t work. Cecil doesn’t understand this next part as well, and it hurts him so much to even think about. 

“Go on,” murmurs Carlos, and Cecil nods a little desperately, curling his arms tight around his knees. 

“I heard him again, later,” and here he has to physically hold back the _listeners,_ putting _later_ in its place. “The static came back, and then Kevin spoke again. His voice was hoarse, like it had not been used for centuries. He sounded so happy to hear me again… As if he was who he used to be once again…. But shattered. He sounded broken, lis- Carlos. He sounded so broken.” The tears are back in full force, and he digs his nails into the cuts in his palms. He can feels Carlos’s heat behind him, and he focuses on that instead of the feeling that is very similar to knives being stabbed into him when he thinks Kevin’s name, and all that goes with it. “K-Kevin… He doesn’t know, he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t know what I’ve done. Future Kevin… will die, not knowing, half of himself, or maybe he’ll never die. Maybe he’ll just… be. Forever. Like me. Always never him, fluctuating between the smile and the shattered-glass self.” 

“There’s more,” Carlos says softly, and his slim, graceful fingers lightly curl around Cecil’s scared, shaking ones, gently pulling them away from the bleeding cuts that the radio host still can’t feel. 

“Then…. Then, listeners,” he doesn’t stop now, he can’t stop. “Then Kevin was back, and it was _Kevin,_ the Kevin that means something, with that brightness. Except the brightness is real, with him. More than just a smile. More. And he asked….” Cecil’s voice trails off, floating away like the wind into the still desert night. “He asked if he won.” It’s a whisper now, a broken, tired whisper. “I told him he did. He deserved to be happy, to believe that he had a chance.” Carlos nods against his skin, and Cecil does not smile. He doubts he will ever feel the same about smiling again. “But the reality of it is that he probably lost himself wondering why I lied. His last thought was that I betrayed him.” 

His boyfriend makes a soft, sad noise and holds him closer, wanting to comfort him but not knowing how. “Cecil,” Carlos says quietly, but he does not have the words that Cecil always seems to have, the words that could make even the moon itself turn its pale head to listen if the radio host put his mind to it. “Cecil,” he tries again, and pulls the man even closer to him. Cecil forces himself to relax his muscles, pretend that the pain isn’t there at all. It’s not that 53% percent of the population can’t feel pain, it’s that they ignore it and suppress it and pretend it isn’t real, that pain is no more than an illusion, just like time and happiness. 

He doesn’t seem to be listening. “It could have been me,” he says, so softly, eyes fixed on the horizon, and Carlos tenses up. “It _should_ have been me,” Cecil presses on. “Better me than him.” Bitter, humorless laugh. “I’d deserve it, anyway. After what happened.” His voice is painfully sharp and hard, the sweet lull of the radio voice gone completely. Carlos can feel the tenseness that returned far too quickly in Cecil’s body, and forces himself to relax if only for the sake of the other man. 

“You wouldn’t deserve it-” 

And for the first time ever, Cecil interrupts him and says “But I _would,_ Carlos, you don’t understand, I do deserve it, I deserve that pain and betrayal because Kevin is me, we’re the same person, that monster and me, we’re exactly the same…” He stutters, caught between trying to explain it better and apologizing. “I’d deserve it,” he finishes softly. He closes his eyes and resolves never to open them again. 

Carlos takes a deep breath, but says nothing, instead rubbing comforting circles on Cecil’s back and pretending they’re both okay. It’s easier to pretend that pain is an illusion. 

Cecil inhales slowly, and drops his head back to rest against Carlos’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything at all.” His voice is choked and soft, on the precipice of more tears, and it wrenches at Carlos.

He shakes his head. “Always say something,” he says, not sure if he knows it should be true, and even if it is a truth, it will always be a lie in this town. But Cecil is satisfied enough with that, and Carlos watches as the muscles of his face finally relax, the furrow between his brows fading away. 

The radio voice is back on, but it’s softer, now, more personal, directed only at Carlos. “My dear Carlos, the stars are beautiful tonight. So lightly they touch the sand and our faces, the caress of a lover in the darkness.” They both look towards the sky, and Carlos smiles. “The void around them seems so light, too. Normally it’s so dark, the spaces between the stars, but…” His voice trails off. “Not on this night. Above us, the lights of distant suns. Below us, the lights of distant lives.” Deep inhale. “It is so beautiful.” 

Carlos listens, and he smiles hesitantly, and presses a light kiss to Cecil's neck. Carlos always listens. 

Somewhere inside them, they know this isn’t over, that tonight Cecil will wake up screaming, because he dreamed that in their mirror is the flickering reflection of Kevin, bloodstained, smiling Kevin, and the night after, and the night after, and the night after, because no matter how many times Cecil will shatter the glass, no matter how many times he fights back, in the shards is the perfect, terrible triptych of what _could_ [should, would] have been.

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully that made you feel things. That would be ideal. To be honest, I wrote this because of how traumatizing the whole thing must have been for Cecil. And the fact that when it comes down to it, Cecil the character is essentially an actor, too, and he is more hurt than he seems. If y Y liked that (or, you know, hate me for making you feel things) drop me a comment! Thanks!


End file.
